Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The Retired Trader Who Bankrolled #OccupyWallStreet

Robert S. Halper, a retired Wall Street trader, spends time each day in
Zuccotti Park talking to protesters about politics and their thoughts on
reforming the banking system.

But Mr. Halper, a 52-year-old Brooklyn native,
never reveals two facts about himself: he is a former vice chairman of
the New York Mercantile Exchange and the largest single donor to the
nonprofit magazine that ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“The
whole thing is very surreal to me — the fact that I spent my whole
career right across the street,” he said in an interview last week on a
marble bench near the park. “It makes me a little anxious, to tell you
the truth. It could go anywhere. I just pray that it ends peaceful.”

Mr.
Halper said he first heard about the plan for protests in June when he
visited Kalle Lasn, the editor in chief of Adbusters, a Canadian
anticorporate magazine, in Vancouver. Over a steak dinner, the two
longtime friends discussed Mr. Lasn’s project, a plan to fill Wall
Street with protesters as a way to galvanize anger on the political left
into a revolutionary movement resembling the Arab Spring.

“I rolled my eyes,” he said. “I was more interested in talking about health care.”

But
Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter
of the magazine, donating by his estimate $50,000 to $75,000 over the
last 20 years since he was first attracted by the magazine’s spoofs on
corporate logos and advertisements. So he wrote a check for $20,000 and
returned to his life in New York.

A
month later, the magazine sent an e-mail blitz to 90,000 readers and
advocates calling for the occupation of Wall Street and setting the date
for the first protesters to camp in downtown Manhattan.

“We
sparked it,” said Mr. Lasn, 69, but “what they’ve done up until now —
with a leaderless movement that is all-inclusive — that’s given them a
kind of mystique that has launched a national conversation.”

The
text of that initial call can still be found on the magazine’s Web
site, which has been filled with photos and videos from the Occupy Wall
Street protests. Mr. Lasn said the magazine’s circulation, now roughly
120,000, had expanded in the weeks since protesters took over Zuccotti
Park on the Adbusters-selected date, Sept. 17....MORE